


therapeutic

by peachyteabuck



Series: vanilla [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Animal Shelter AU, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Masturbation in Shower, Voyeurism, mentions of depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 13:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19853986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peachyteabuck/pseuds/peachyteabuck
Summary: after a mission goes south and leaves five innocent civilians in caskets, natasha has trouble recovering from a mistake that lands on the shoulder of bad intel. to cope, natasha’s therapist reccomends getting a cat.for once in natasha’s long, long life, she listens to advice from someone just trying to help.this is a part of my universe that incapsolates vanilla / sugar & spice, but neither fic is required reading.





	therapeutic

**Author's Note:**

> this is my entry for @flightofthefantasies beat the heat writing challenge! my prompt was “animal shelter au.” enjoy!!

Natasha is lonely, extremely so. She’s still too anxiety-stricken to be near anyone, so she’s spending a lot of time in either therapy, in her bed, or…

Nope. That’s it. She’s either in therapy or in her bed.

* * *

The therapist Tony hired is sweet, pretty; much too pretty to be a social worker for a bunch of mentally ill superheroes.

“What do you suggest I should be?” she asked her when, once again, the tunnel between her brain and mouth became a little too wide. The shrink suggested in one of their earlier sessions that it might’ve been the trauma taking over, that for years she’d been forced into silence for so long somehow that it’d all just started flowing out of her like blood from a wound with its suture ripped out.

_Jesus, even her extremely detailed inter monologue was unnecessarily gorey._

Natasha shrugged, staring at the small plush llama on her desk as he spoke. “I don’t know, what do pretty people do these days?”

The therapist just laughed, shrugged, and pointed to one of the framed diplomas on her wall. “Get PhDs, I guess.”

Natasha really likes her therapist. It’s not that she felt comfortable with her, per say. The room, with its wide windows and secluded spot on a floor filled with research labs, always causes Natasha’s anxiety to rest at a low hum in her now-almost-healed ribs. But the woman with the wide smile and autumn wardrobe is cool, better than the other therapists Tony hired after Natasha had recovered enough from her incident to leave the med bay. This therapist never pushes her to share anything specific, never prods at Natasha to share her abusive childhood or abusive relationships or the times she was made to use sex to make dirty old men tell her secrets, or…

Sometimes she just goes in there to talk about something she’d been thinking about. It’s nice, honestly, to get an opinion from someone other than Steve, the only person who’s brave enough to enter the depression cave she calls her room.

Natasha loves Steve, but Steve is also what her therapist calls a “fixer.” Every time Natasha has a thought or a flashback or blinks a little too quickly, Steve always wants to fix it. Natasha has a stomach ache, Steve is making her ginger tea. Natasha has a headache, Steve gets him painkillers Natasha wants to nap, Steve hands him a blanket and gets him out of the post-mission meetings.

Natasha doesn’t really want to be fixed. Maybe wants to be pain, maybe he just wants to figure things out for himself. He can’t really tell yet.

Natasha’s therapist never tries to fix her, which is nice. She just lets her complain and offers to help. Sometimes she rejects it (she’ll figure out how to stop stabbing her pillows in her sleep by _herself_ thank you very much), but sometimes he doesn’t.

“I just feel really lonely,” she says one day while sipping at hot chocolate (a lot of things suck, but Keurigs? Natasha likes Keurigs). “But people…” Natasha sighs. “People are…”

Her therapist sets down her own white chocolate Frappuccino and nods. “Garbage?”

Natasha laughs a little. “Yeah, they’re complicated. And I feel like they all look at me with pity and whatever. I don’t like it.”

The therapist shrugs, her deep maroon blazer falling down her right shoulder. She doesn’t fix it, and it bugs Natasha in a way she can’t describe. “Have you thought about pets?”

Natasha almost spits out the hot liquid. “Pets? I can barely take care of myself, how am I supposed to take care of a dog.”

His therapist rolls her eyes. “I didn’t say a dog. Also, you seem to forget this whole building is wired with a high-tech Alexa. Pretty sure JARVIS can take care of a cat.”

Natasha wrinkles her eyebrows. “A...cat?”

She nods. “Yeah. Why not?”

Natasha stays silent but doesn’t disagree. That night in bed, she grabs for the cracked Stark Phone Tony always makes her carry around with her. Something about being able to contact her in the case of an emergency or whatever.

She avoids the small pieces of glass that come falling off the device as she types.

_Why should I adopt a cat?_

She skims the long, poorly edited blog posts that come up. Most of them are listicles or whatever the fuck they’re called now, full of gifs of cats doing ridiculous things. They’re all most definitely geared toward a demographic that Natasha doesn’t meet, pretty post-college young women with bright eyes and futures and whatever else can be called such a word as “bright.”

She’s just watching cat videos on YouTube – ones of fat ones with overbites and skinny ones with yellow eyes and tiny kitten with big personalities – when she gets the text from her therapist.

_This might help_ , it reads, with a link sent right after it. It’s one to a scientific paper about serotonin levels and cats and veterans with PTSD. It takes awhile (see: more than two seconds) to download, and when it does she sees that it’s _long_.

“Who does a whole-ass study on cats,” she mumbles to herself as she scrolls past the acknowledgements. 

Nevertheless, Natasha reads the entire one-hundred-and-fifty-page thesis, including the bibliography. The paper is decently concise: Pets can greatly increase quality of life, lifespan, and can significantly reduce stress. Other studies indicated pets may help people with expression of emotions - especially trauma patients.

The next morning, she wakes up twenty minutes before her usual time (noon) and asks JARVIS to find her the nearest animal shelter.

It’s about one in the afternoon on a random Wednesday, so she’s not surprised by the lack of potential adopters in the waiting room. Even so, she tenses as she scans the room and obscures her face from the security camera located behind the receptionist’s desk. The woman taking down Natasha’s adopter-relevant information looks bored, not questioning when Natasha says she might want a senior cat. Either way, she’s told to sit down until the vet tech on shift can see her,

Natasha’s almost overwhelmed by the abundance of sounds in the hallway that leads to the far end of the rescue. Dogs ranging from a young Chihuahua puppy to an aging Mastiff bark in a ply for her attention, but Natasha doesn’t pay them any mind. She just follows you, half-listening as you talk about the history of the shelter, how you’ve always had a no-kill policy, blah blah blah. She’s not paying attention, way too focused on how your ass looks in those and he almost slams into you when you stop to open the door.

Just inside is a small pen, filled with tiny kittens. You bend down to pet a few, but eventually moves past them. One of them tries to climb the woven plastic barricade, unsuccessfully vying for Natasha’s attention.

Down another small hallway is a medium-sized room, filled with plush blankets and worn-down stuffed animals and fluffy pillows. The minute the pair of you step inside, Natasha understands why _this_ is where you brought her.

Inside are a small hoard of disabled cats, all looking like they’d just arrived from surgeries or from inside a car engine. One cat, a blind one, bumbles around aimlessly until it walks into something, when it turns about ninety degrees before continuing its journey. Another one, an orange one, has a shaved belly and stitches and lays in a pile of fleece blankets.

Natasha’s staring at an elderly one with no ears when she realizes you’re speaking.

“…there are a few that might be a match for you,” you turn to her as you grab a chubby, three-legged cat who squeaks – not meows, _squeaks_ – in disapproval when you grab at her. “Her name’s Ingrid. Was brought in a few months ago after she was found hiding in some bushes. Leg had to be amputated and people aren’t her favorite, she mostly just wants to sleep, eat, and chill.”

The cat, smaller that Natasha had anticipated adopting, is put down after she wiggles furiously in your arms. She doesn’t move, doesn’t try and run, but stays _just_ far enough away that she’s not touching Natasha’s jean-clad leg. She bends down to get a better look, noticed her right ear has been snipped. As the cat moves her head around to see, Natasha notices that while her left eye goes up, the right eye goes down. The cat – _Ingrid_ – yawns and lays down right where she’s sitting.

_Apathetic, doesn’t like to be held or touched, and wants to nap all the time_ , Natasha laughs to herself. _A woman of my own heart._

“Yeah, I’ll take her.”

It takes about an hour to sign the paperwork and pay the nonrefundable deposit, as well as schedule the home visit to make sure her apartment isn’t going to like, kill the cat or whatever. She’s _giddy_ when she leaves, actually _excited_ for something as the late-afternoon air fills her lungs. Natasha immediately finds the nearest pet supply store and spends over an hour and a half just buying _toys_ , not to mention a little cat bed, a customized collar, and _oh!_ A cat tree! And a scratching post! And cat shampoo and nail clippers and some treats for Ingrid’s _wittle teeny_ teeth. At the last second, she also buys a “ _Cat Mom”_ keychain, because why the Hell not.

She has it all delivered, given the total cost of her purchase being over two _thousand_ dollars and her having walked to the cat shelter (and all subsequent locations) meaning she couldn’t exactly carry all of that in her arms.

When she pushes through the heavy _Avengers Only_ door that leads to a set of large elevators, Natasha’s…excited. Elated, ecstatic, nearly too happy to stand still as she’s taken up to the floor that contains her apartment.

The visit is scheduled for the next Thursday, which is less than 72 hours away, so Natasha _cleans_. Not only does she pick up the dirty laundry that’s populated her floor like an invasive species in a fragile ecosystem, but she scrubs her bathroom with bleach and does her laundry and changes her sheets and dusts her fan and organizes her book collection and wipes down the walls and vacuums and-

She’s three-quarters of the way done when Steve shows up at her door, eyebrowed furrowed as his nose wrinkles at the onslaught that is the thick wall of cleaning chemicals poorly-masked by lemons and fruit and whatever the fuck “spring” is.   
Natasha shuts him down before he can start, shooing him out of her open doorway with the squirt of a bleach solution to his grey shirt. They don’t exchange words, almost don’t need to – Steve seems to understand that Natasha wants to be alone. Still, on his way out he manages to get out a “Why are you-“ before she sprays him _several times_ on his ass. Natasha doesn’t respond with anything besides that. 

When the day of the visit comes around, she’s _freaking the fuck out_ \- but more than usual. _Way_ more than usual. Her entire apartment has been deep-cleaned, _twice_ , and she’s watched so much Maria Kondo and Hoarders and whatever else Netflix recommended to her.

She double, triple, _quadruple_ checks to make sure she told FRIDAY you would be coming, that the AI wouldn’t kick you out or report you to Stark’s extension security system or whatever else happens to trespassers. Natasha’s even thought of the team, and what they would do if they found out what she was doing before it was even confirmed she was doing it. Luckily, most of the Almighty Avengers are watching the season finale of America’s Next Top Model, and the two that aren’t (Stark and Banner) are pre-occupied “deciphering” a machine Natasha half-heartedly welded/hot-glued at four in the morning the day previous. Hopefully that’ll also put them in a good mood, thereby making them more receptive to a foreign creature in the skyscraper they all call home.

Natasha meets you downstairs, making sure she sees her angel with a cat carrier before anyone else does.

She finds you exactly where she told you to be, cooing at the screaming kitten who wishes for the abolition of her fabric walls.

“Thanks so much for meeting me under these,” Natasha sighs. “weird circumstances. I _really_ appreciate it.”

The cat takes the sound of a new person’s voice as prime opportunity to release a pained, but adorable, meow. _Let me out!_ It cries. _I would like to explore please!_

You and Natasha laugh, then she directs you to her living room, still smelling of flowers that poorly mask the scent of bleach. You take a moment to scope a good spot to allow the kitten her precious freedom, and the moment you let the terror escape her confines the tiny-legged poorly-balanced ball of fluff immediately bounds around the place like she owns it.

“Oh!” Natasha coos. “God, she’s so cute! What’s her name?”

You nod, agreeing. “Her name is Kimbra, isn’t she adorable? Her foster home says she’s great with people and super sociable. Loves to be pet and stuff. A huge cuddler, too.”

The cat, apparently knowing the time is ripe to beg for attention, comes over to the pair of you and rubs her face against Natasha’s ankles. As you bend down to scratch behind her ears, purrs erupt from her tiny chest.

You and Natasha chat for a while as you watch Kimbra get acclimated to her surroundings.

It’s a few hours (hours that feel like minutes), when the pair of you are on the floor with crossed legs as the cat weaves between each of you - loving all the attention crawling between your laps and purring up a storm as you coo and play with her.

With the both of you scratched at her stubby limbs, you get a ding on your phone.

“Sorry,” you say as you read the text, trying to get Kimbra into her cage. “We have a vet appointment before we have to take her back to her foster family…”

When you pick her tiny body up with one hand, she angrily squeaks and tries to grab onto Nat’s leg. It’s a little painful – her tiny claws are sharp as _fuck_ , but it’s still sweet that the cat doesn’t want to leave.

Natasha thanks you for coming, for accommodating everything that’s weird about her life. As she walks you to the exit and watches you stroll farther and farther away from her, it sort of hits the woman that she cannot, and should not, keep this from the people she works, lives, and eats with.

This knowledge aside, it’s still jarring when the morning she let the news break they all circle her like hyenas around a limping gazelle.

“When do you think we’ll actually get the cat?” Sam questions.

“Can we get one of those dumb orange boy cats?” Clint requests.

“Do you think the Hulk would like the kittens?” Bruce muses.

“I want a black one,” Bucky states plainly.

Natasha’s overwhelmed, _so_ overwhelmed. Wanda, it seems, is the only who notices, diverting their attention to something Natasha doesn’t have the mental space to process at that moment. In the span of _seconds_ she’s placing herself between the anxiety-ridden Russian and their swarming teammates, a physical barrier between the insatiable creatures desperate to gain access to a small, adorable animal.

“Why don’t you all collect your thoughts in another space,” she tells, not asks, the rest of her coworkers. “And allows us some time to plan for our new addition.”

With that, and one more glare from Wanda, they disperse.

You’re on the subway heading back to the shelter, one hand over the cat carrier in your lap and the other scrolling through bootleg Avenger animal merchandise when you get a text from Natasha.

_So…_

_I think that went well_

_I guess_

You smile a little, touched by the _literal superhero’s_ nervousness. It’s touching, sweet, to know this godlike figure doesn’t think she can just waltz into any random shelter or pet shop and pick whatever cat she wants without any sort of background check or home visit or photo ID or…

_yea, it went super gr8_

Natasha’s reply comes almost instantly.

_That’s fantastic!_

_What’s next?_

Her eagerness makes you smile.

_just a short interview_

_just to like_

_mke sure ur not gonna use ur cat fr animal sacrifice or smth lol_

_Who conducts the interview?_

_me_

_i mean, most likely_

_esp since i’ve like, already put this much work into u lmao_

_Awesome! When/where can we have it?_

It takes days for you and Natasha to stop talking like teenagers, even if it only took five minutes for you to book the interview for her. At first, Natasha seemed to have genuine questions about cat ownership. But after a few more personal questions about your history with the domesticated apex predator, the comfortable conversation turned into heavy, _heavy_ flirting.

To her luck, Natasha’s interview went the same way every interaction with you had gone: exceptionally well.

When she gets home from the five-hour interview, Natasha immediately jumps into the shower with the cold water as freezing as she can get it. Still, it seems no matter how hard she tries – she can’t stop the heat pooling between her legs. She’s ashamed, confused, terrified; mostly, though, she’s incredibly aroused. Slick invariably runs down her thighs as she steps out of range from the water, cool mist turning down the temperature of her skin save her cheeks and inner thighs.

It’s been months since Natasha’s felt this way, maybe even longer since she had the urge to do anything about it. Her hands travel down her chest, down her navel, shaking as they trace the goosebumps across her skin like an explorer following the lines of a map they’d never seen. Natasha follows her stretch marks, the hairs she missed while shaving that morning, her scars and bruises and angry red lines down to her own aching center.

The feeling is foreign, almost like she’s thirteen again and has just kissed a girl for the first time. She throws herself under the freezing water for a moment to clear her foggy brain, then tucks a single finger into herself.

Natasha moans, loud and unabashed, as she pictures you in all the ways she wants to take you. Images of you kneeling on the floor of her bedroom with a mouth wide open and arms tied behind your back, you spread eagle on her bed with a vibrator tied in position on your leg and a gag between your teeth, you screaming for more as she fucks a strap on in and out of you. As the coil in her intestines becomes tighter and tighter and she’s got four fingers deep in her own cunt and two fingers of her other hand rubbing at her clit and the sounds of her own wetness become louder and louder Natasha’s fantasies become lewder and more descript; she can picture you under her as she bites at your skin and listens to cry out as pain pinches at your spine, modeling lingerie for her as soft music only you could choose plays in the background, riding Natasha’s thigh as she ignores you in favor of her phone – listening to your whines get more desperate as you attempt to reach a climax that may never come if she doesn’t allow it.

Natasha orgasms with a deep, desperate moan as she gushes onto her fingers. For a few moments she leans against the wall and pants, eyes shut and hands weak. _What had she done?_ Natasha bit at her nails as she hastily turned off the shower and dried off with a single black towel. _Could she even look you in the eye after all that? Would she have to give up Ingrid because she couldn’t keep it in her pants!?_

No, dammit. She is getting this cat, even if means being forced to be around the most beautiful woman Natasha’s ever seen.

_Especially_ if it means being forced to be around the most beautiful woman Natasha’s ever seen.

The next day, Natasha meets you at a local Starbucks to sign the last of the paperwork (as well as to get you to sign the NDA you’d agreed to when you entered the part of Stark Tower dedicated to the personal lives of the Avengers.

You’re dressed in some maroon t-shirt dress with a cream cardigan and suede booties – looking like the librarian fantasy Natasha had tucked away in some strange crevice in her brain once people had started recognizing her at the New York Public Library. For a moment, she stands there awestruck – eyes stuck on a few strands of hair that had fallen from your ponytail. The sound of your name being called out by some overworked, underpaid college students who is _definitely_ high snaps Natasha out of her teenage-like horny mental spiral, her eyes watching you closely as you grab the caramel iced coffee off the marble countertop.

Natasha follows you to some small table in the far back, surrounded by people who pay neither of you an _ounce_ of their precious time. There, you pull a stack of paper from your large purse, held together by the biggest, _pinkest_ paperclip Natasha Romanoff has _ever seen_. The papers – totaling what was likely less than a fourth of what she had – was wrinkled, some pages even dog-eared. Tiny holes – tiny _teeth marks_ – riddle the edges. Natasha feels out of place with her pristine, bleach white printer paper with _STARK INDUSTRIES_ insignia marking the top and bottom of each page in thick blue ink.

You, just like Natasha, have marked where the opposite needs to sign with thin, multicolored sticky notes made of thin plastic. The moments that both of you scribble your names is silent save the sounds of pen and paper, the small pauses Natasha takes between scribbling her signature time for her to watch your hands as you flip through the many pages.

You two share an awkward, though not unwelcome, hug as you bid each other goodbye. Still, as Natasha pulls away, you swear you can feel a lingering touch on your hips you wish would last forever.

Ingrid is brought to Natasha’s apartment a few days later, the cold cat – quite unhappy to have been jostled around in a cab – immediately scuttles under her new owner’s freshly made bed.

Natasha turns to you with fear in her eyes, terrified her new pet hates her and her new home and, and… ****

“Don’t worry,” you sigh, closing the cage. “She’ll become acclimated soon enough. You got the guides on that stuff, right?”  
Natasha nods, remembering the small paperback books (not pamphlets, _books_ ) that she had picked up from a you-approved cat blogger online.

Silence settles over the room, neither of you knowing what to say.

You offer the first move. “So, you have any dinner plans?”

Natasha gulps, silently cursing all her spy training for failing her now. “Not uh,” she takes a moment and sighs. “No, no plans for me.” Another awkward moment passes. “Do…you…have plans?”

You shake your head, equally terrified but totally smitten. “No, I uh. I don’t. Have you been to the Italian place downtown? It’s hole in the wall, but, legitimately the best alfredo I’ve ever tasted.”

Natasha’s exhale hides her exuberance. “I’ve never been but, I’d love to go. With you.”

When Steve asked her in earnest the next day whether the Italian place was really that good, Natasha replied that you had been right.

But, truthfully, neither of you made it to the family-owned eatery. Rather, you ended up in some empty back-alley with three of Natasha’s fingers buried in your pussy and your back pressed against the wall.

_“Fuck_ ,” you hiss as her thumb finds your swollen clit. “Fuck don’t stop.”

Natasha bites at your bottom lip, her other hand moving to grope at your breasts. “I wouldn’t stop for anything, any _one_ in the world.”

“Not even if,” your sentences break with moans at she thrusts the digits harder into you. “Not even if someone were to catch us?”

They’re in an alley with no foot traffic, Nat made sure of that, but still, as you pant into each other’s mouths and you cum all over her hand, it’s a magical feeling that someone could catch you in such a vulnerable state of pleasure.

“We should do this again,” you tell her, cheeks heated and lungs crying for hair.

“Yeah,” Natasha agrees.

There is very little talking ( _verbal_ talking, at least) for the rest of the night. In truth, Natasha wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
